March 31, 2013

Editor’s note: We publish occasional messages sent to us by the Countess Apraxina. She and former White Courtesy Telephone editor Albert Ruesga became friends after meeting at a Tolstoi Foundation reception many years ago. According to Albert, the two spent the rest of the evening drinking Champagne Martinis and pretending to share a fondness for the works of Turgenev. The Countess consistently and mistakenly refers to Albert as Alyosha ...

My Dearest Alyosha:

I am surprise to see my new assistant, Ivan, read your blonk. He tell me he is on payroll of Vikki Spruill who as you know is безумный [ed: crazy] for foundations. Poor Ivan is dangerously bored with your writing so you will stop immediately. Yesterday he dissolve 50 Ambiens in Big Gulp frozen daiquiri. But don’t worry, my little turkey waddle, he did not drink. As he hold cup to lips he say, “Inducing state of eternal nothingness would be redundant after reading White Courtesy Telephones!”

How tedious you have become, my little zaychik, and I mean this only in nicest way. As we say in old country, “Guilt is rope that wears thin quickly.” Much better to make powerful people feel good about themselves. We are the winners, Alyosha. Don’t lecture us about truth. We eat truth for breakfast with side of sausage.

You will call me on cell, please, to tell me how much you admire me and because I need your advice. Am working on new Impact Investments project for Global Philanthropy Forums. We are going to bring power to villages in rural India by passing electricity through people too hungry to move. This will stimulate activity at Bottoms of Pyramid. Villagers will then use electricity to shop on Amazon. Investors get 3 percent of every purchase over 10 Rupees.

I have foot massage at four o’clock your time but call me after. Ciao.

Thank you, Bill, for this invitation to continue the conversation that Caroline started in her Chronicle of Philanthropy article.

Some of us have had the good fortune of working alongside the “great souls of philanthropy,” grantmakers who are self-effacing and self-critical and who see their work as belonging to a moral tradition that stretches back thousands of years.

Others of us have had the experience of working with professionals in philanthropy whose egos suck all the oxygen out of a room, who give out pats on the head and strut about like big chickens only dimly aware of their moral disfigurement … and I mean this only in the nicest possible way! To those of you who’ve witnessed this less attractive side of philanthropy, you might justifiably marvel at the thesis that philanthropy is killing itself with kindness.

But it is, my friends, it is.

And here I need to make a distinction: By “philanthropy” I’m not referring to the generosity of individuals and families and others who’ve given of their own wealth, sometimes at great sacrifice, to help others who are less fortunate, or who’ve given to help fill our lives with music and art.

I’m referring largely to the benthic creatures, like myself, who inhabit foundations established with other people’s money.

Something strange and, frankly, something a little creepy happens when human beings gather around mountains of un-earned cash, much as we witness unwholesome transformations of character when family members gather around the casket of a wealthy great aunt who has no heirs and whose last will and testament has been pronounced. My friends, it can get ugly.

And yet in spite of this incipient creepiness, we end up killing ourselves with kindness. How is this possible?

II.

Let’s exclude the general middle class niceness that permeates the field of organized philanthropy. We see this kind of politeness in every major American institution.

The kind of niceness I’m convinced is killing philanthropy is the kind that keeps us from speaking the truth to one another—or at least, from expressing what we take to be the truth.

We learn very early on in our careers to self-edit every “no, but” into a “yes, and,” partly because it’s considered rude to directly contradict a colleague. To posit a competing point of view would require us to work out the actual truth of the matter, if there is one, by adducing facts and exercising our reason. Instead we throw every half-cocked idea that pops into our heads onto a piece of flipchart paper and call it a day.

Why do we do this? What’s the danger here of being a little less nice and a little more forthcoming?

When the interaction is peer-to-peer, there are several forces at play. First, there’s a kind of sentimentalism in the philanthropic sector that holds that every point of view is equally valuable, however benumbed or just plain false it might be. Just as in the film The Meaning of Life every sperm is sacred, in philanthropy every witless idea gets pride of place on the benighted flipchart. This is a vestige, perhaps, of the ravages of postmodern thinking on the American academy, which destroyed an entire generation of young minds and continues to fuel the relativism we see in many aspects of American culture. Second, because there’s so much mobility in the field of philanthropy, the colleague that you disgruntle today might well become the foundation executive who controls the stream of funding to your organization tomorrow.

Keep in mind the fact that there is no reward system in philanthropy (as there sometimes is in academia) for exposing or avoiding fuzzy thinking. On the contrary: foundation CEOs who feed their trustees on a steady diet of pure baloney appear to me to stand a better chance of holding onto their jobs. Nor does any kind of tenure protect the outspoken. Instead, it’s often the case that the squeaky wheel gets the grief. And because in philanthropy we are accountable to no one but God and the law, we don’t feel any great pressure to expose ourselves to the “salutary qualities of an external discipline,” as one of my colleagues once described it.

Things get especially dicey when a program officer, for example, expresses his unedited opinion to a powerful foundation CEO. This, in the parlance of my field, is a “career-limiting move.” I have on many occasions heard one of these powerful CEOs deliver 15 minutes of uninterrupted piffle from the conference dais only to see him surrounded by fawning admirers assuring the speaker that his talk was the crowning experience of their lives. Unfortunately, the truth bends around the powerful people in our field the way light bends around massive objects in space.

And so in this and other ways, truth often becomes the first casualty of philanthropy.

III.

How does our tendency to behave as craven colleagues or fawning lickspittles kill philanthropy? After all, don’t we see this kind of behavior in every field?

There are, I believe, many kinds of philanthropic truth that we need to own and debate and teach and insist on before we can move forward as a field, but we don’t do this to any substantial degree. I would argue—if I could find somebody to argue with, which of course I can’t, because we’re all so busy being nice to one another—I would argue that this issue, organized philanthropy’s uneasy relationship to various kinds of truth, is at the heart of numerous befuddlements in our sector.

I strongly believe, for example, that there are many practical truths about grantmaking that we need to champion. And yet I might forego expressing these truths when my colleague tries to force a merger between two organizations; when he refuses to let his grant money be used for salaries and other kinds of “overhead”; or when he wears his grantees down to stumps by convening them with excessive frequency. A hundred years of experience have taught our field that these practices—and many others like them—should be roundly condemned, that there are in fact better and worse ways of making grants. And yet I sit on my hands and “yes, and” the offender into a warm pool of self-satisfaction.

There are other kinds of truth in philanthropy that come to us not by experience, but by the work of many great thinkers who preceded us. We don’t speak these truths to one another because many of us are unaware of them; or worse, we’re aware of them but dare not offend others by insisting on them. So, for example, periodically you’ll hear the canard that we can’t “attribute causality” to the kinds of social interventions that foundations fund, when in fact we can attribute causality in large classes of cases, even in those cases where our desired outcome is some change in human behavior. The great pioneers in the field of causality in the social sciences—Georg Henrik von Wright, H. L. A. Hart, Tony Honoré, Donald Davidson—are largely unknown in philanthropy, even to the professional evaluators who serve the nonprofit sector. Some of these same truths about the nature of causality in the social sciences would, if widely debated, undermine the great faith many of us place in the construction of so-called theories of change—painful exercises we often inflict on our grantees.

At any conference of grantmakers you will hear us trample like unfeeling cattle on historical truths, on truths about the interpretation of texts, on insights into the nature of culture and how it changes over time, on new research into the rationality of human actors—without anyone, except perhaps Bill Schambra, raising his voice in protest.

We don’t speak the truth to one another because we’re afraid of exposing our assumptions, our frameworks for understanding the world, our biases, to intelligent scrutiny. These assumptions and frameworks shape the way we approach grantmaking and they should be made explicit and vigorously debated because 90 percent of the time we are simply mistaken or see only a small part of the truth. Are we or are we not living in a post-racial America? What does an equitable society look like? I doubt that in my lifetime we will publicly debate these great questions in philanthropy; we will not run the risk of offending one another; we will not derail the gravy train or in any way threaten our comfortable sinecures.

IV.

To ask about the place of truth in philanthropy is to raise, in my view, the most fundamental question about the nature of grantmaking practice: What kind of enterprise are we?

Are we a kind of applied sociology in which we’re given so many dollars to maximize a posited social good? Is that what we’re about?

Alternatively, since our practice is rooted in a moral tradition, are the truths we should most concern ourselves with moral truths?

Or are we a managerial field, a possibility lamented by my friend and colleague, Phil Cubeta, who writes in his GiftHub blog:

The wealthy through foundations and nonprofits manage social change via inputs, outputs, outcomes and petty rules and management hierarchies that denature a potentially revolutionary social movement of the disenfranchised into a well managed and non-threatening project to assist the disadvantaged upon their release from the State Penitentiary …

“Could it be,” he asks, “that philanthropy is ... the expression of a managerial tradition, of a capitalist, and technocratic, rather than moral tradition?”

If we’re not entirely a technocratic field, are we perhaps a hybrid field that can and should borrow thoughtfully from many disciplines?

I suspect we’ll never get the chance to settle this question. Our kindness will keep us burning through hundreds of millions of donor dollars, wearing our little triumphs like great badges of honor, untouched by the blinding, often unkind, light of reason.

V.

A few disclaimers before I close: Any resemblance between characters I’ve described in my talk and actual persons alive or dead is purely coincidental, as is any correspondence between what I’ve said and the actual truth of the matter. The author would especially like to exclude from any criticism, implied or otherwise, all those present at this gathering, whom I hold in the highest regard, knowing well that you and I, unlike other possible persons, cannot possibly fall into the conceptual and moral traps I’ve described, and that you constitute a body of exceptional people, filled to bursting with the highest moral intentions, and are more than worthy of the kind of praise that might in other situations be deemed excessive.

With that said, thank you for hearing me out! Really, you’ve been too kind!

February 06, 2013

In a field not generally known for the extraordinary, an extraordinary thing happened some three years ago at the Council on Foundations annual meeting in Denver: philanthropy was put on trial. By philanthropy I don’t mean the outpouring of generosity by individuals and families, but so-called “organized philanthropy,” characterized by the work of foundations and other institutional grantmakers.

Gara Lamarche, then-CEO of Atlantic Philanthropies, was the prosecuting attorney, opening his case with a spirited “J’accuse!” Ralph Smith, Senior Vice President at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, parried with a heartfelt defense.

A jury of twelve was assembled from the audience and they were taken away to deliberate on the evidence presented. Was philanthropy, or was it not, underperforming in its quest to help create social change? Should it, or should it not, be convicted for its lackluster outcomes?

In the end, these twelve jurists failed to reach a verdict and the jury was declared hung.

I mentioned that an extraordinary thing happened three years ago. In fact, several extraordinary things happened. First, the Council on Foundations had the courage to organize such a trial in the first place. Strangely, although the session was enthusiastically received, nothing like it was ever staged again, as far as I know. And although it wasn’t widely reported at the time, ten out of twelve jurists voted to convict.

Most extraordinary of all, perhaps, was the fact that there was no follow-up to explore what it meant for the grantmaking profession that five out of six of its practitioners, chosen at random, voted to condemn it. No outcry, no sackcloth and ashes, no gnashing of teeth over martinis in the hotel lounge. Try to imagine five out of six phlebotomists denouncing their trade, or five out of six train conductors.

Was the session’s outcome an embarrassment to the panjandrums of philanthropy (to borrow a phrase from Bill Schambra)? Was it now to be swept quickly under the rug, like so much else of moment in our amnesic field?

While philanthropy may have gone on trial three years ago, we’re not past the moment when we can fruitfully ask those five out of six why they voted as they did. If, as I suspect, their judgment represents the general sentiment of the field, what, in their view—in our view—are the primary reasons why grantmakers tend to underperform? Is it because foundations generally fail to identify and address the root causes of our problems, treating only their symptoms? Is it because foundations are too top down, woefully in the habit of doing “to” rather than “with”? Do they fail to deliver social change because their work is little governed by metrics or business principles? or is it because there’s such an attenuated sense of accountability at many of these institutions?

Moreover, wouldn’t it be valuable to know if there’s any measure of consensus on the two or three factors that, in the view of foundation leaders or of the people they purport to serve, contribute most strongly to holding back the field? How would our most experienced grantmakers answer this question? And why on earth haven’t we bothered to ask them?

Based on closed-door conversations with peers, I believe that near the top of our list of failings (or the reasons for them), we would find a general lack of candor—with our colleagues, with our trustees, with ourselves—about the forces that create, maintain, and perpetuate many of our social ills. As Wittgenstein famously said, “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must pass over in silence.”

If we can’t expect grantmakers like me to be especially good at catalyzing significant social change, might we be expected to have some clarity about why we so often fail at the attempt?

December 03, 2012

Big Data is getting to be big newsinphilanthropy. A team of researchers at the University of Schmerz am Überhogen recently starting analyzing a large database compiled by a consortium of Bavarian foundations. They used anomaly detection and dependency modeling techniques to sift through 700 petabytes (700 x 1015 bytes) of digitized conference plenaries and flip chart notes.

In a paper recently published in the Überhogenerzeitungsgebrungensjournal, these researchers reported finding a very striking linear correlation between the age of grantee organizations and the year of their founding. They also uncovered a series of highly “cohesive” (German: kohäsiv) data patterns, one of which is displayed below:

October 08, 2012

In this scene from Monsieur Vincent, the French chancellor summons Vincent de Paul to his well-appointed office to receive a valuable lesson in the management of the underclass. Challenging the social and political structures that give rise to yawning disparities is out of the question. But effective managers have many options. For example, Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) consumers with “severely limited resources” can have their product awareness and demand appropriately “stimulated,” generating market rate returns for Impact Investors. In times of fiscal belt-tighetning, the poor can be persuaded to allow their unused organs to be harvested for the benefit of the more productive classes. The bracing effect of the market will ultimately separate the winners from the losers, driving the latter to an early demise and thus relieving the strain on public coffers. If we’re impatient, we can simply “disappear” the poor, putting out of sight a demographic that undermines our faith in the benevolence of market forces. The goal is an uninterrupted flow of capital and goods, a sustained growth in the GDP. And for this we need good order. How to achieve it? Best not to ask too many questions.

Chancellor: The poor are multiplying and they’ve become a real threat. Beggars everywhere! And nowadays, if you don’t give them anything they threaten you.

Vincent de Paul: They’re hungry.

Chancellor: With my job, I have other kinds of hunger to appease! France is hungry, for safety, for order ... I’ve requested your presence here because I have some good news. After your life-long dedication to them, you’ll be happy to hear that, in two days, there will be no more poor people!

Vincent de Paul: How?

Chancellor: It’s very simple. They’re under arrest.

Vincent de Paul: But poverty is not a crime.

Chancellor: I’m afraid it very surely leads to it. My job is to anticipate, and that’s what I’m doing.

October 01, 2012

There’s nothing like a perch plucked from the depths of Lake Como, poached by a master chef, and arranged in pastry shells covered with a well-seasoned sauce béchamel, yolk of one egg, and knob of butter to inspire new thinking about the economic insecurity of American workers. I’ve not yet been invited to Bellagio or Davos, but I know it’s only a matter of time.

Scores of colleagues have made these pilgrimages, worrying about the state of the world as they take in the mountain air. My turn will come. I notice, however, that these colleagues tend not to insult their hosts by implicating them in petty shortcomings. Nor do they dwell on the spectacular failures of our field. Rather they conduct research and predict trends that are challenging and upbeat, enabling their patrons to strut, au courant, in front of restive board members. I am in their debt, being generally rather slow on the uptake.

Lest I be accused of being yet another leach on the body of American generosity, I hope you’ll marvel at my own well-researched predictions for future trends in the foundation field, available in TED Talk, Pecha Kucha, Ignite, and 140-character formats with speaker’s fees waived and optimized for alpine vistas:

Biggest Data Ever. Genetic engineering will create miniaturized monkeys who’ll be trained to type vigorously on specially designed keyboards. Their output will be mined for interesting patterns by highly compensated experts.

Voucher Philanthropy. Instead of making grants, foundations will award grant vouchers directly to the deserving poor, snapping a towel—with market force—on the buttocks of underperforming charities.

Nano-Lending. The gap between the haves and the have-nots will increase, and the number of poor grow so large, that micro-financing will become unobtainable by most. Instead, low-income people across the world will be offered nano-loans collateralized against small pieces of plastic and other debris.

The Wearable Foundation. This all-graphene suit will insulate the most sensitive among us from too much reality and provide extra headroom for personalized liberal echo chambers. Optional micro-hydraulics will provide a confident gait while spoken words are sifted through a Universal Scrambler™.

Quantum Grantmaking. Quantum theory tells us that Schrödinger’s cat can be alive and dead at the same time, prompting physicists to posit parallel universes in which each possibility and everything in-between is simultaneously instantiated. Taking advantage of this phenomenon, evaluation-fixated foundations will soon require not only outputs and outcomes from their grantees, but hyper-outcomes as well—benefits to parallel universe denizens affected by real-world interventions.

Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) Market Efficiencies. In the United States, it’s considered at best impolite to kill the poor. As a nation with deep religious roots, we strongly prefer that the market do it for us. To increase the efficiency of market forces, the poor, who generally lay about listlessly, will be bled daily for valuable plasma and have their unused organs harvested for deserving job creators and their pets.

Dearest Western European Conference Organizer: I offer you a heady tour of poverty parks, genetically modified program officers, and more! A world in which the apple you’re saving for lunch is networked to implants in your salivary glands—ready to signal the optimal moment of ripeness. A world in which throngs of “network weavers” and nonprofit visionaries wander through your streets cataloging and creating connections between things real and imagined.
Trust me: I can make you look good! Hey, MacArthur, are you feeling me yet?

September 10, 2012

You would think, given alltheballyhoo over the importation into philanthropy of for-profit business models, that the
foundation world is crawling with MBAs.
It’s not. Ask a roomful of philanthropoids
about their academic bona fides and you’ll find that many have backgrounds in
the liberal arts, in law, in the sciences, or in nothing in particular. This is
a healthy thing for a field still searching for its soul.

You’ll also find that younger people in the field have hidden their
undergraduate degrees in their sock drawers, haunted, perhaps, by the memory of
some infelicitous essay on Plato’s Republic.

Let it go! Let it go, I
say! Our first inklings of a world
beyond that described to us by our parents have extraordinary value. The exhilaration we felt at being
invited to question
authority can still save our field from grave errors.

Let’s reclaim those tens of thousands of dollars we suspect were
wasted on our college educations. Our
parents still love us. They’re proud of
their son or daughter who’s now gainfully employed, doing something “having to do
with irrigation, I think,” as my own mother—God rest her soul—once described
it. The nonprofit world needs fresh thinking,
mired as it is in the corporatist nescience that currently passes for wisdom.

If you
majored in Cultural Anthropology …

We need you most of all. Perhaps you’ll write
the first ethnography of organized philanthropy, describing its
rigid hierarchies and the fabric of myths that support its delusional over-estimation
of the foundation’s contributions to human progress.

If, in your quest for truth, you find yourself quailing—take heart! You have a colleague
who blazed the trail: Joel Orosz, founder of the The Grantmaking School, who published
an extraordinary proto-ethnography of the foundation world titled, Effective Foundation Management: 14
Challenges of Philanthropic Leadership—And How to Outfox Them. What made it extraordinary was Orosz’s
willingness to speak with candor about the culture of a field that “lacks a salutary
external discipline.”

What Dr. Orosz wrote on the subject of foundation risk-taking is especially
revealing. If foundations have the
freedom to try pretty much anything to address society’s problems, he asserts,
“it would be virtually
impossible to open a newspaper without reading of a groundbreaking social
experiment fueled by their funding.”

It’s true that foundations as a class are not very good at
communicating their good work or its importance. But according to Dr. Orosz, the appearance of
ineffectiveness does not deceive us.
There is a hidden reason for the inability of many foundations to address
our most pressing social problems, and that reason is embarrassment. According to him:

Since foundations are undisciplined by
the market, electorate, or funders, their only impetus for improvement comes
from their (generally) self-perpetuating board of trustees. If you are a
foundation leader, your imperative thus is a simple one: keep the board happy,
and you will keep your job. So, what makes a board happy? The answer is easy:
pride-inducing success. What makes a board unhappy? The answer is equally easy:
embarrassing failure. What does this mean for the CEO? As a practical matter,
the answer to this question is also very simple: since any kind of success is
preferable to any kind of failure, since embarrassing the board members is to
be avoided at all costs, it is critically important that every project be a
success. What is the best way to ensure that every project will be a success?
The key to perpetual success is to keep every project uncomplicated and modest
in its ambition. Thus, inexorably, in order to keep their boards happy, in
order to assure that embarrassment never darkens the trustees’ doorsteps, CEOs
tend to seek the cautious and incremental success. Paradoxically, the societal
organization given the most freedom to act hobbles itself; it is as if a superb
French chef, capable of creating any gastronomic delight, insisted on making
nothing except the blandest of oatmeal.

The problem is one of foundation culture. It’s culture all the way down, argues Orosz. Culture that kills strategy. Culture that imposes a kind of omertà on grantmakers, keeping them from
shouting these truths from the rooftops: “We are guilty of small ambitions! We live in morbid fear of losing our prized sinecures!”

Only you dedicated students of anthropology can unravel this tangled
ball of cultural yarn and put us on the right track. Consider wearing muted colors and
sensible shoes so you can mix freely among us natives.

If you majored in Behavioral Economics …

You know the score. You’re
hep to the homo economicus jive. So many decision-making models imported from
the world of business and finance attempting to exploit the predictability of human
actors. The ideal foundation executive,
according to one prominent prototype, posits this predictability to develop highly articulated theories of change
and assign Bayesian probabilities and financial payoffs to possible outcomes,
transforming complex sociological problems into straightforward utility
calculations. The technical term for
this, I believe, is “pure baloney.”

Dan Ariely popularized the field of behavioral economics when he
wrote the book Predictably Irrational,
which a New York
Times reviewer described as a “far more revolutionary book than its unthreatening manner
lets on.” The book, according to this reviewer, is
“a concise summary of why today’s social science increasingly treats the
markets-know-best model as a fairy tale.”

Fortunately for us, you behavioral economists don’t believe in
fairy tales! You know how perfectly chaotic
our species can be. It’s time for you to insinuate
yourselves into one of those three-person panels our field produces in such
prodigious numbers and set the record straight.
As if to prove your point, defy audience expectations by wearing Groucho
glasses and a light-up bowtie.

If you majored in Linguistic
Forensics …

The tools of your trade can help elucidate the innermost
workings, the nefarious tics and obsessions, of the Philanthropoid Mind! [music sting]

An article in the July 23, 2012, issue of the New Yorker article titled “Words on Trial” recounts the story of
James Fitzgerald, the retired FBI forensic linguist who brought the field to
prominence by helping to solve the Unabomber case. He cracked the case by noticing
stylistic similarities between Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and the language of hundreds
of documents seized by FBI agents while searching Kaczynski’s hut.

What are we trying to hide behind that thick impasto of verbiage tinged with violence? What insecurities are revealed by the fact
that we are always “meeting around
issues of diversity,” to take one example, rather than meeting simply to
discuss diversity? There’s a story
here and I suspect it isn’t pretty.

-----

So, my friends, proudly use your specialized knowledge to expose the piffle that currently dominates our field. Brandish your calculators, your close
readings, your foam core models like billy clubs. As
the past twenty years have demonstrated, no idea is so feeble, so absurd, or so incidental to our field that
it can’t become a topic of animated water cooler discussion in the arid plain of
Organized Philanthropy. Soon, perhaps, I’ll have the Big Data to prove it.

August 28, 2012

Speaking at a discussion hosted by the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange, made this observation:

Oftentimes we miss moments to challenge the cultural conversation and we instantly go to policy. And I think that’s where we lose. We can’t have conversations outside of culture and where people are getting their information every day. We have to challenge that and hold those structures accountable the same way we want to hold elected officials accountable.

Rashad is right to say that many activists see policy change as the Holy Grail of social change efforts, or that, at the very least, they tend to underplay the role played by culture in keeping low-income communities marginalized. Activists and funders fall prey to the Systems Heresy: the belief that injustice is largely “structural,” that it’s the property of a system that regulates human behavior rather than a property of actors who are frequently all too human.

If policy change is difficult, the shifting of culture must seem impossible by comparison. It happens so slowly, so imperceptibly. We know from the history of large social change efforts in the United States—women’s suffrage, the ending of slavery—that shifts in cultural norms both precede and lag behind significant policy victories. Attitudes about women and African Americans continue to evolve. Unfortunately, the time scale for these cultural changes makes them unlikely candidates for foundation funding which is too often focused on the quick victory—or its simulacrum. Given that a cultural shift will take its own sweet time, is it even worth the attempt to accelerate the process?

If cultural change efforts do in fact get a raw deal from grantmakers (and I have no reason to doubt those who tell me they do), is it time for the foundation world to reassess its priorities? I’m struck by the fact that my colleagues seldom send me links to earnest reports about low-income communities. Instead my inbox brims with clips from The Colbert Report and The Daily Show skewering the attempts of policymakers to dismantle the safety net for the poor. Perhaps more effectively than any study of racial and economic disparities, movies such as Precious have reached millions of people capable of empathy and opened their eyes to the overwhelming challenges of living in poverty.

By contrast, so many reports on the plight of the marginalized have been dead on arrival. Just in the past three months, in my own beloved city, we’ve been overwhelmed by the bad news. This past June, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, alongside the Orleans Parish Place Matters team, published a report titled Place Matters for Health in Orleans Parish: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All. Among its key findings was the fact that the average life expectancy in Orleans Parish varied by as much as 25 years depending on a person’s zip code of residence, and that those zip codes with the lowest life expectancy had a higher population of low-income and people of color. The poorest zip code in the city, with a majority population of African Americans, had an average life expectancy of 55 years while the zip code with less poverty and a mostly white population reached 80, a 25-year difference! Another report this past June from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center analyzed new census and other survey data to find, among other things, that 48 percent of our black children in Orleans Parish—that’s one in two—live in poverty, defined as an income of about $18,000 supporting a family of two adults and a child. A more recent report published by the Urban League found that nearly 30 percent of black students in New Orleans—that’s one in three—had been suspended or expelled from the Recovery School District, more than twice the statewide rate and over four times the national rate, due to stringent, zero-tolerance policies. These policies have left us with 14,000 youth between the age of 16 and 24 who are neither enrolled in school nor employed. My foundation contributed to the long string of dismal news with its own study of asset poverty in New Orleans.

And yet there’s been no outcry, no wringing of hands, no rending of garments.

We need these data to understand the magnitude of the challenges that face us. Yet what a serious miscalculation to believe that numbers quantifying the misery of our neighbors are sufficient to move us to action. And here, I believe, is where we can learn from the cultural geniuses among us. They, much more than the rest of us, understand how to make lifeless numbers jump off the page; they have ideas for breathing life into depressing graphs of mostly downward trends.

One aspect of their genius is their appreciation of the complexity of culture. Culture to them is not a bone we gnaw on together, a dented fender we attempt to hammer smooth. It’s less like an object we bang on and more like the air we breathe, the invisible threads of meaning that connect us.

I fear that activists and funders might be stuck, unable or unwilling to embrace the key roles played by potent cultural forces such as empathy and shame-inducing satire. How can the champions of culture help us reinvigorate our sluggish steps toward social change? In the US context, perhaps, we’ll never acquire a culture in which public deliberation becomes a significant force. In this new Dark Age, dominated by the new American Visigoths—the Radical Religious Right, the anti-government activists—how can culture help truth gain a foothold?

August 06, 2012

I like this one because I often get stuck. Millions of dollars in foundation assets pressuring me to make the world a better place and I just sit there like a dried blowfish without a thought in my head!

Imagine my delight when I inserted the AA batteries into my Initiativ-a-Lator® and, with one flick of a switch, transformed my feebleminded ideas into a $25 million, five-year program to end poverty!

There’s a special offer on orders placed before September 1, 2012: You receive the “First Program of Its Kind” press release template that turns your ill-conceived initiative into a paragon of Strategic Grantmaking. If your program tanks, use the optional “Mea Maxima Culpa” template to win valuable Transparency Points® for you and your foundation.

The Equali-Tea Party Play Set

For the little justice warrior in all of us. You couldn’t have missed the TV ads with the jaunty jingle:

♪ Go put out your best ♫ ♪ For your multi-cultural guests ♫

What’s in the box? A miniature 18-piece tea service and a full complement of Equali-Tea Party Dolls spanning a dizzying range of worldviews and values that frequently come into horrible, violent conflict with one another. The set includes a 1:4 scale Eleanor Roosevelt action figure with spring-loaded Karate Chop Arm® to keep your tea party guests in line.

What is impact investing? I think it involves bringing people at the Bottom of the Pyramid (ancient Egyptian slaves?) into the market by selling them things they can ill-afford to buy. This is called “stimulating consumer interest and demand.” Whatever it is, I know I fell in love with this product the first time I saw the ad:

July 30, 2012

How, short of civil war, does a nation typically work through periods of intense social polarization? In the United States we face persistent racial and ethnic divisions as well as stark income and asset inequalities. We’re currently experiencing these differences in the context of some very uncivil election year rhetoric and the emergence of a new kind of American class consciousness characterized by the Occupy Movement.

Given these polarizing forces, what is the glue that keeps contemporary American society from spinning apart? Is it simple inertia, a kind of consumerist satiety? Do we ever in fact learn to resolve our differences, or do they come into greater or lesser focus depending on the whims of our commentariat? If we manage somehow to work through our divisions, where does this bridging work happen?

It’s not the first time in recent history that we’ve come to a perceived boiling point. In a 1995 book titled Beyond Individualism, Michael Piore wrote about a “social deficit” created in the 1980s and early 90s that eventually led to increased political mobilization and social instability. A pivotal event of that era, according to Piore, was President Reagan’s crushing of the federal air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, an action that “galvanized anti-union managerial factions in a whole variety of industries and occupations where union organization had previously been unassailable.” It was open season on organized labor. The wealthiest Americans saw a marked increase in their standard of living while the incomes of blue collar workers declined. The savings and loan crisis and its attendant bailout presaged our contemporary financial market meltdown and moved some commentators to dub the period between 1985 and 1995 the “Looting Decade.”

Political life also took a nasty turn. The Bush campaign’s Willie Horton ads in 1988 alienated black Americans, while the family values rhetoric of the 1992 campaign targeted single mothers, feminists, and gays and lesbians. Against this backdrop of political turmoil, identity groups grew in visibility and pressed their claims on American society. According to Piore, we could not, during this fiscally lean era, opt to settle these claims through massive social spending. All of this created an atmosphere of tension and instability, perhaps not substantially different in feeling and tone from the one we’re currently experiencing.

To address this increased polarization, Piore suggested that politicians and policymakers champion the borderlands, institutions in which “social claimants” could cross group boundaries and communicate their needs and concerns to society at large. Through dynamic give-and-take “political conversations” in these borderland institutions, marginalized identity groups could become agents in the creation of a new national culture. Participants in these discussions would interpret their actions to themselves and others in ways that acknowledge the effects of one community of meaning upon another. Perhaps on occasion these discussants would even celebrate their inevitable clashes of interpretation.

II.

There’s so much that’s compelling about Piore’s vision of the borderlands, rooted, as it appears to be, in Aristotle’s view of Man as the “political animal.” Somewhere between Wall Street and the Occupy Movement’s encampments in Zucotti Park there would be a space where both bankers and activists could plead their cases. Ideally the 1% would get a clearer sense of the effect of their actions on people with modest means, while the 99% would better understand the economic system that for better or for worse implicates us all.

Unfortunately, in twenty years or so of nonprofit work, I’ve known only a handful of organizations* that fit the description of a borderland institution. First, most civil society organizations are segregated by race, ethnicity, class, and the other divisions that borderland institutions are expected to bridge. Even when these organizations are not segregated, they seldom make it their mission to champion give-and-take conversations across group boundaries. From my own experience of participation in diversity trainings, poverty summits, and other intergroup meetings, these bridging conversations are fiendishly difficult to pull off.

Of course the mixing of people from different backgrounds happens outside the context of civil society organizations, in such venues as grocery stores, sports stadiums, parade routes, and popular music concerts. But these are not typically places consecrated to boundary-crossing deliberation and the forging of a new civic culture. The fact that Piore dubs his institutions “borderlands” suggests how marginal this kind of discussion has become. Perhaps in some real or imagined past we talked through our differences in the town square or the agora. In these nefarious times, however, we’ve pushed these conversations to the edges of civic life, we’ve made them exceptional rather than central to the political and other processes that shape our national character.

June 13, 2012

Over at the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, my colleague Phil Buchanan is tilting at the windmill of “business thinking” in foundations and other not-for-profit organizations. “You would think,” he writes, “after what we have witnessed in the past several years, that the word ‘business’ would not be used as a synonym for ‘effective.’” Since most businesses, like most nonprofits, fall somewhere in the range between mediocre and good, he argues, charities should not be so quick to embrace the practices of the for-profit world.

Why should this argument matter to you?

There are tens of thousands of foundations in the United States controlling over half a trillion dollars in assets. One of their most extraordinary characteristics is the degree of freedom they have to pursue the Common Good. Working within the strictures of the law, they can spend as much as they want, however they want. In partnership with civil society organizations, they can marshal armies of volunteers. They can pool their funds and coordinate their actions to magnify the impact of their work. They even have license to criticize and bankroll the reform of government, and indeed change just about any aspect of our social, economic, and political lives.

And yet the headlines generated by this extraordinary sector typically look like this:

Coalition of Organizations Convened and Funded by Foundations Ends Homelessness in Alabama

Foundation Leaders Speak Out on Income Inequality in the United States

There’s often a big gap between foundations’ stated intentions and what they actually manage to accomplish. It’s no wonder that those of us in the grantmaking profession—myself included—turn to “business thinking” for inspiration. Given the modest outcomes we generally produce, just about any new kind of thinking would do.

II.

From a certain perspective, organized philanthropy is an interstitial field. Wealth is created by individuals who, in the holiest moments of the charitable act, dedicate their good fortune to others rather than to themselves. It’s then our job to direct this wealth to the people who will do the most good with it—not us, but the individuals in nonprofit and other civil society organizations who feed the hungry and house the homeless.

From the earliest days of organized philanthropy, those of us who work at foundations have chafed at the notion that we are mere middle men in the philanthropic enterprise. We’ve gone so far as to pay consultants to create a kind of mythos for philanthropy in which foundations hold their own in the troika of Donor-Grantmaker-Grantee. The standards for our field in fact require that we move beyond the transactional, the interstitial, and “add value” to the funds we steward. We do this, for example, by using our convening power to address community problems; by sharing our knowledge; by encouraging citizens to give; and by other means that enable us to sleep with our highly compensated selves at night. Our insistent—I would say febrile—grasping at business models partly reflects our attempts to be good stewards, to add value in the ways I’ve indicated.

But if the business world is our primary source of inspiration for the conduct of philanthropy, then, I would argue, we betray a profound misconception of the charitable enterprise. A playwright needs to publish her plays and have them produced, and she too can benefit by importing lessons from the for-profit world. But her primary muse must remain Melpomene rather than Sam Walton or she ceases to be a good playwright. Is the philanthropoid more a businessman than a humanist? more a technocrat than an activist?

It’s easy to see why we look to the for-profit world for our models. The work of philanthropy is often framed as a social mini-max problem: We are in situation X facing social problem Y. We are given $Z to (a) solve this problem in the least amount of time, using the fewest resources; or (b) maximize the benefit to low-income communities; or perhaps (c) most fully satisfy the ego-needs of our CEO. This framing leads us to conclude that philanthropy is essentially about spending money to create a product or service. So we run into the arms of the nearest MBA, and while in that tender embrace are bidden to “allocate resources on a dynamic basis,” “foster partnerships,” “develop innovative approaches to evaluation,” and do other things couched in toothless bromides we tearfully accept because we have it on good authority that this splooge will finally fill the Great Gnawing Void in our professional lives.

III.

Because we lack firm moorings in this very young and still evolving field, we’re easily distracted. In at least one alternative interpretation of our work, philanthropy is about a higher kind of consciousness; about self-awareness; about work that implicates us in some of the deepest questions we can ask ourselves and our fellow men and women. If it doesn’t implicate us in this way, then we’re playing a parlor game with other people’s money. We’re not taking seriously enough the deepest yearnings that moved an individual to forego spending huge sums of cash on herself in order to better serve Humankind.

The contest between the technocratic and so-called “values approaches” to philanthropy is typically played to a draw: we need both, we are told at the end of what often reads like a shaggy dog story. And of course we need both, but this conceals the fact, in my view, that our effectiveness is much more profoundly compromised by our disregard for the latter than for the former. No amount of business acumen in the world can compensate for our failure to understand how deeply implicated we are in a system that keeps so many of our fellow men and women in abject misery.

There are better and worse ways of doing grantmaking and I’ve had the great privilege of working with many inspired grantmakers over the years. What made them inspired, in my eyes, was their ability to work in creative partnership with grantees and others to get big results for the communities they served. (The jargon du jour for this is “high impact philanthropy.”) And yet their success had little if anything to do with the tonics prescribed in journals like the Stanford Social Innovation Review and other torch bearers of the new technocracy. As I read these publications, I find that what’s most remarkable to me about organized philanthropy are the things that organized philanthropy finds most remarkable.

IV.

I love this field for a thousand reasons. In the conduct of my work, I turn for inspiration not to the MBA but to the donor who feels some obligation to her fellow men, to the nonprofit or comunity leader who clings to her vision of a world re-made, and, at times, to the foundation executive or program officer whose work displays wisdom and humility.

I rue the fact that I work in a field untried by bracing debate, a field fond of trotting out old half-truths tarted up in fresh Business-Speak to persuade newcomers (and those of us with short memories) that we’re finally on to something new. Borrowing an image from Martin Luther, we make of philanthropy a whore who sits rouged and powdered by the window, waiting to be swept up in the arms of any John who will promise her an honorary MBA, or support her habit of self-denial on matters of social change.

We’re a field searching for its subject, unaware that that subject is ultimately us.

May 14, 2012

The year: 2235. Zerbina, a successful interplanetary trader, and her holohusband Zork, are waking up to their first cup of Andromedan coffee. They have their central communications unit tuned to Intergalactic Public Radio, and host Robert Siegel-backslash-12 is relating the top news story of the day. An extended Martian drought has left tens of thousands of poor migrant settler families with diminishing supplies of food and water, he reports. One of their spokesmen urges legislators to pass the Emergency Relocation Bill that has been stalled in the World Senate for weeks.

Zerbina is moved to take action. “Computer,” she says, “Who’s helping the Martian settler families?” Instantly her hyperbrowser searches the iWeb for organizations that are providing relief to the beleaguered families, displaying a list of names and profiles on the smartsurfaces of her apartment. She scrutinizes the list: there are 790 different organizations headquartered on six planets and three moons.

“Which of these organizations has the strongest advocacy record?” Zerbina asks thoughtfully.

Her hyperbrowser once again springs into action, instantly sorting through and interpreting tens of thousands of press releases that have been posted to the iWeb. The Intergalactic Immigration Forum jumps to the top of the list.

Zerbina smiles: she knows this organization well. Responding to a small donation she had made to them a while back, they had been sending her holographic newsletters for several months, keeping her apprised of their work. The Forum had long ago applied for and received iWeb Charity Accreditation, enabling the organization to accept secure subspace money transfers.

“Computer,” she says, “Transfer twenty teracredits to the Intergalactic Immigration Forum. Mark the transfer ‘for support of the Martian migrant families.’”

In 1986 Tim Berners-Lee, the actual inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote an article for Scientific American Magazine titled “The Semantic Web” heralding a new set of tools for the internet that would enable browsers and other automated agents to more easily understand web content. Items encoded in a semantic web page would provide hints about their meaning, bringing us closer to the day when Zerbina and other donors would consult and interact with the internet as they might with a trusted advisor.

The Semantic Web has yet to be realized as Berners-Lee envisioned it. Web pages are not being marked up with semantic clues in significant numbers. A more transparent web might nevertheless be coming to us from a different direction: web-interpreting agents like Apple’s Siri and IBM’s Watson are getting better at drawing their own conclusions about the meanings of web pages and their contents.

A striking aspect of these new agents, one that holds substantial promise for e-giving, is the degree to which they might be able to reduce donor “friction”—the many steps and processes that interpose themselves between a donor’s initial desire to give and her consummation of a gift. A donor might be moved to tears by a story about homeless children on NPR, but by the time she switches on her laptop, waits for an internet connection, fires up her browser, finds a worthy charity, fills out an online form, and enters her credit card number, her generosity might have dwindled significantly.

Web-interpreting agents like Siri are most likely optimized to extract information from commercial websites. But nonprofit organizations can maximize their online success by doing much more to accommodate human agents. I’ve visited the websites of many charities and been stumped by enigmatic mission statements written in impenetrable Nonprofitese. I’ve been unable, without many clicks, to determine what, exactly, a nonprofit does, or what an advocacy organization would like me to do. Too few charities feature a “Give Now” button prominently on multiple pages of their websites, and some neglect to provide a snail-mail address altogether.

Rather than worry too much about an inchoate future, we might do better to attend to our woeful disregard for the demands of the present.

April 25, 2012

Old dingoes like me who remember the 1980s campaigns to encourage disinvestment from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa might also remember the role played by the Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Baptist minister who at the time was a board member of General Motors. He developed a set of principles for companies doing business in that country which essentially required equal treatment and access to opportunity for all workers regardless of their race.

The Sullivan Principles, as they came to be known, were adopted by over a hundred companies that had operations in South Africa, and they were used effectively by many advocates for divestment.

What’s most striking about these principles is that (1) they were voluntary: there was no regulatory body that required compliance; (2) they helped coordinate activity across a broad range of stakeholders; (3) they united activists in common cause with the business community; and (4) they contributed to a great social good: the end of apartheid in South Africa.

What if progressive funders were to develop and voluntarily adopt a set of principles that governed the way they worked with one another, that strengthened their collective efforts? What would such a set of principles look like?

Here are some I would introduce for discussion:

The “Do ‘With’ Rather Than ‘To’ Principle”: This principle would be suitably elaborated for different kinds of actors. It would govern how grantmakers treat their grantees, and how each of these treats the communities they serve. A national funder operating under this principle, for example, would never dream of parachuting into a given geography without first meaningfully engaging local partners in the analysis, choice of strategies, selection of tactics, and overall program design for his intervention. This principle is intimately related to …

The Maximization of Coordination Principle: It would be a natural part of the planning work of the aforementioned national funder to gather together colleagues—both national and local—who were working in the same geography (or issue area) to map each of their proposed contributions, understand their theories of change and strategies, and explore ways to support one another’s work. Local funders would be expected to do the same with their colleagues. The “Do ‘With’ Rather Than ‘To’ Principle” alluded to earlier would help ensure that grantees and other stakeholders were included in these conversations. Another aspect of this principle that would need elaboration is the coordination of advocacy and community organizing activities—coordination horizontally, so local (or national advocates) know what their colleagues are doing, and vertically, so that national advocacy efforts connect in meaningful ways to local advocacy efforts, avoiding the “random advocacy walks” we so often see.

The Drop Everything Else You’re Doing Principle: To repeat what I’ve written elsewhere, the next time an issue—let’s say it’s immigration reform—garners sustained national public attention, all of us who are progressive funders, advocates, and community organizers should drop whatever else we’re doing and get behind the issue. Even if immigration reform is not our thing, we should devote a substantial part of our organizations’ resources to helping the progressive advocates for that issue win their legislative or policy victory, and we should encourage our partners to do so. Progressives got clobbered two years ago during the national debates on health care reform. Here was an issue that would affect the fates of people in low-income communities for years to come. Yet while many health advocates struggled valiantly to win support for a national health care system, many more activists ignored the issue because it simply wasn’t theirs. They saw themselves as education advocates, or housing advocates, or criminal justice reform advocates, or something other than simply advocates for low-income people. Imagine what would have happened if funders, advocates, and community organizers across the country had adopted the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Principle. Imagine if the voices in the pews, in the schools, in the neighborhood centers had been able to shout down the opposition. This is related to ...

The Get The Money Out Of Politics Principle: One of the main problems with American democracy is how to acquire it. With only 535 senators and representatives, it’s small wonder that progressives can’t afford to buy one. The amount of money spent on getting elected is obscene, and in contemporary congressional races, the biggest spender has almost always won.1 The issue of money in politics cuts across all areas of progressive work and often puts a full stop to our best advocacy efforts. We should all be devoting attention and resources to this issue.

The Everything is Connected Principle: While LGBTIQ advocates, for example, clearly have specific agendas (e.g., equal rights, anti-bullying legislation, etc.), they, like all progressives, need to understand the broader context in which their particular struggles take place. This is one gay man’s opinion: we can disconnect the struggle for LGBTIQ rights from other civil rights issues, but in doing so we evince a profound misunderstanding of what it is that gives power to our calls for justice.

The Empowerment Principle: We should always be striving to yield power to our grantees and to the communities they serve. When doing capacity building work, for example, rather than inflict a consultant on a grantee, we should make a grant to that organization so it can hire its own consultant.

The Globalization Principle: We often work in our little part of the world, on our own small set of issues, and we lose sight of the emerging World Order that affects our work in ways seen and unseen. The Globalization Principle would help ensure that it’s part of our collective efforts to understand how globalization increasingly affects us and our colleagues overseas.

Please feel free to suggest your own principles or elaborate on those listed above. I see the development of these principles as much more than another idle flipchart exercise, and hope there’s enough interest in continuing the discussion.

Progressives in the US context are consistently outflanked and outspent. These principles constitute one suggestion for how to give our efforts some conherence and some teeth. How would you go about it?

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1If you consider all congressional elections with at least two general election candidates during the last six election cycles, the candidate with the largest war chest won 8 out of 10 Senate races, 9 out of 10 races in the House. These figures do not reflect the very high cost of being able to run in the first place, much less successfully. It’s no accident that 47 percent of congressmen (250 members) are millionaires. The influence of the new Super PACs is yet to be determined. But the plain old vanilla political action committees follow a familiar pattern. Of the top ten PACs (measured by total giving in the 2012 election cycle), 8 represent corporate interests, 2 represent labor. The data are consistent and overwhelming.

March 20, 2012

I was surprised and pleased by the question posed by Bill Schambra in a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy op ed: Is Conservative Philanthropy Ignoring the Poor? His thoughtful article provided a refreshing counterpoint to some of the anti-poor messaging of the Republican primaries. It should be noted that in Democratic primaries, by contrast, candidates don’t so much attack the poor as simply ignore them.

I share Schambra’s admiration for the generous men and women of all political and social ideologies who understand the obligations of living in community. One of the most “progressive” programs in the country, in my view, was launched by a couple with impeccable conservative bona fides. The Taylor Plan, which started in Louisiana but has now been adopted in 21 states, leverages public money with private money to guarantee a college education to all qualifying high school graduates. It’s difficult to find a more compelling contemporary example of work that might over time significantly reduce racial disparities in higher education.

II.

Some readers might have stumbled, as I did, on Schambra’s invocation of George W. Bush as an icon of the “compassionate conservatism” his article celebrates. Many liberals and conservatives still fail to see the compassion in state-sanctioned torture, and in a war declared on false premises that has cost thousands of military and civilian lives and bankrupted the country. Under President Bush, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was notorious for political cronyism, frequently accused of linking grant monies to campaign support.

Putting this issue aside, we can more clearly focus on the heart of Schambra’s argument, which is this:

… [B]eyond the problem of political image lies the more substantial issue of conservatism’s enduring charitable obligation to the poor. Ardent advocacy for reduced government spending is fine, but it must be matched with serious regard for the needs of those affected. This is a moral demand upon a movement that takes moral demands seriously.

A refreshing call to action. As an example of a serious regard for the needs of the poor, Schambra cites a group of wealthy conservative business executives in Denver whose largesse helped Step 13, “a small, scruffy rehabilitation center for addicts,” buy the building it could no longer rent.

First, hats off to this forward-thinking group of businessmen who, without being solicited, saw a significant community need and responded to it. Addiction is not an issue typically embraced by individual donors, conservative or otherwise. I’m reminded of the Business Council of New Orleans & the River Region in my own beloved city, an organization that has championed the very difficult issue of prisoner re-entry and re-integration.

Having given credit where credit is due, I invite the reader to reflect on the philanthropic archetype proposed by Schambra, in which a generous patron bestows favor on a grateful supplicant. What concerns me is that this assistance for the supplicant depends very much on the vagaries and inconstancies of donor volition. What if this group of businessmen had not heard about the plight of Step 13? What if they happened to be strapped for cash this particular quarter? Should services for the addicted, a clear and consistent public need, depend so much on chance?

Sticking with this inspiring example, I would rather that our collective noblesse (mine included) be more than morally obliged since experience shows that individual volition can make for a flimsy safety net, especially in those cases where the supplicant has participated in his own ruin. I know that some donors put homeless addicts in the category of the “undeserving poor,” making fundraising for organizations like Step 13 a real challenge.

In complex societies, individuals are typically obliged to support important public goods through taxation. Being a small government liberal, I’m no friend of taxes, and if Mr. Schambra has an alternative, I’d like to hear it. Perhaps instead of levying taxes, we can agree to impose schmaxes, the latter coming into force when and only when the spirit of charity fails us.

March 18, 2012

Is grantmaking getting smarter? As I reported elsewhere, the answer appears to be ‘not by much’ or at least not fast enough, according to a survey recently released by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. This study of mostly US foundations found that over the past three years, there were only minor shifts in grantmaking practices that help grantees succeed, such as providing general operating support and awarding multi-year grants.

Perhaps a different set of questions would have been a little more flattering to me and my colleagues.

For example, self-identified social justice grantmakers like me could have been asked to detail our coordinated plans for overcoming our country’s racial and other disparities. (To conserve space, I believe the survey designers could have safely limited this response to 140 characters or less.) We foundation CEOs could have been invited to stumble through some account of the root causes of poverty, although, quite frankly, without the benefit of a head-clearing trip to Davos, I’m not sure how I would have answered. And let’s be fair, these things take time. The disenfranchised of the world need to exercise patience while we schedule more meetings to study the situation.

Or, perhaps, in the interest of stakeholder engagement we could have asked the public how we’re doing on reducing global warming, educating our children, and ending homelessness.

You get the idea: a softball question or two on the survey that probes some of the less technocratic aspects of our work would help restore the bell curve to a less alarming shape and do much to paint a vivid portrait of those of us who sport the mantle of the grantmaking profession.

March 14, 2012

In Mary Shelley’s beloved novel, Dr. Frankenstein was a visionary member of the scientific community of his day, who, sensing the terrible nature of his work, isolated himself from the world to conduct his experiments. He was a god-like figure, a “modern Prometheus” breathing new life into inanimate flesh.

Imagine how a well-meaning member of the nonprofit or foundation world might have rewritten Shelley’s tale. Perhaps, from this perspective, Dr. Frankenstein’s approach to creating human life was too top-down. This is what ultimately led his townsmen to take up their torches and pitchforks to hunt down and kill his monster.

Suppose instead that Dr. Frankenstein had invited each villager to dig up his or her favorite body part in the churchyard and bring that to a community visioning process. The creature, when finally stitched together, might have sported five arms and two heads and been unable to breathe for lack of a trachea, but it would have been their monster.

Unfortunately, research indicates that group brainstorming processes that involve simply eliciting and accepting the contributions of multiple participants, without examining these contributions critically, rarely outperform processes that incorporate a robust measure of respectful disagreement and debate.

And yet brainstorming, “consensus-building” processes are endemic to our field. Every potentially bone-headed thing we’ve ever said is reverently recorded on a piece of flipchart paper now hanging in some facilitator’s office. Being overly cautious not to offend our colleagues, we self-edit our “yes, buts” into “yes, ands,” as if by doing so we can bleach out the stain of our disagreement.

That is how we in the foundation world take what might be an extraordinary tale, a great advance in human knowledge, and turn it through groupthink into lifeless quiltwork. These processes account for the myriad incoherent mission statements we encounter in our work, which are not so much mission statements as overwrought landscape paintings attempting to capture every inconsequential detail of some alien terrain. What might have been simple statements of purpose are often yes-anded into meaningless word salad.

Inclusiveness is an important value in nonprofit work, I get that. Yet I often find that a regard for including all points of view in these processes does more to make us feel good than to improve our work. We celebrate our consensus not fully understanding what the cost is to the communities we serve.

Philanthropy lacks the respectful, yet bracing, debate that is so much a part of the culture of the business world and of academia. It would take a deliberate and sustained effort to shift our culture, but doing so might at least help us avoid compounding the sin of ineffectiveness with the sin of incoherence.

February 20, 2012

Does the recent Komen Foundation debacle signal an increasing scrutiny by the giving public of nonprofit activities? Just as we can’t attribute every record-breaking heat wave to global warming, neither can we assume that recent high profile cases (ACORN, NPR) represent anything like a trend.

Recall that many years ago foundation support for the Boy Scouts took a nose dive after it was revealed that the organization was discriminating against gay men. As long as I can remember, our senators and representatives—both at the national and state levels—have attempted to score political points by targeting charities. I would guess that during any session of Congress there will be at least a handful of bills with provisions to curtail the advocacy rights of nonprofit organizations. (The Alliance for Justice can provide all the sordid details.) Consider also the restrictions on legal service providers that receive funding from the Legal Services Corporation—in force since 1996—and the occasional high-profile ACLU case that’s kicked around like a political football.

What’s clearer to me is that as the American culture wars drag on, more and more charities will be caught in the crossfire.

Charities need to attend to three factors in addition to an increasingly nasty civic culture. We’re living in an age of more activist donors (though I wonder if the research would support this view). The advent of the Internet has raised citizen expectations about the accessibility of information. And finally, calls for transparency in private and public institutions have increased.

Charities beware: You can bet that as we get closer to the November elections, every contribution made by a candidate will be scrutinized. Political operatives will attempt to score big points from a public that generally doesn’t understand the nonprofit sector and can be easily whipped into a froth about the work of shadowy foundations.

I have two primary suggestions for charities. The first is for boards to sit down with their staffs and determine what mission-appropriate transparency means for their organizations. However insistent the calls for transparency might be, I would never, for example, unless I were compelled by law, agree to audiotape board meetings and post these recordings on the Internet. I believe this would stymie the free and open exchange of ideas and ultimately compromise our mission. Other organizations might have a different take on this, but it’s critical for each organization to think through the issue of transparency.

Second, and more importantly in my view, your organization needs to determine whether it has a moral center, and if so, get in touch with it. That means understanding your identity and mission. Years back, the Girl Scouts were willing to take a hit for their nondiscrimination policies. The great value of a not-for-profit organization is that it has no shareholders whose pecuniary desires it needs to satisfy. It can afford to be governed by the love of mankind. Sure, the Girl Scouts lost some donors, but we can assume it gained others in the process.

The time for charities to do their soul-searching is now. Once a campaign against your organization goes viral, it’s time for you to step up to the microphones and tell the world who you are and where you stand. Faced with the question, “What are you about?”, in the wake of an unpopular decision, do you have a clear idea what you would say?

Do you exist to maximize donor support, to perpetuate the life of an institution? or do you exist to advance the cause of justice, however unpopular that might be?